Possibly the first national media attention ever to land on Boulder, home of the University of Colorado and also of aging hippies increasingly outnumbered by tech zillionaires, happened because TV directors picked a Queen Anne house on Pine street as the televised home of Mork and Mindy in 1978. But Robin Williams' Mork character, a space alien from the planet Ork, might have felt more at home in one of the futuristic concrete shells designed by local modernist Charles Haertling beginning in the 1950s. Haertling (1928-84) is often described in terms of philosophical parallels to Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff. But before the decade of the 60s was over, he had developed a distinctive visual language of his own. A few Haertlng-designed houses, like the Menkick house (1970) on Boulder's western edge, reflect the horizontality and rectilinear massing of some of Wright's Usonian houses. The crisply defined spaces and forms of the house are clustered around a huge rock outcropping which was left intact by the surrounding construction. The '59 Plymouth Suburban pictured would have fit nicely at the height of Haertling's career, but it actually lives at the Menkick house now.
Other Haertling works, like the Brenton House from 1969, take a more uninhibitedly futurist approach to the idea of organic architecture, so that the result recalls science fiction of the era. In a way, the Brenton house anticipated one work of science fiction, as it was featured four years after its completion in Woody Allen's Sleeper ...
To the best of my knowledge, all the Haertling-designed houses in Boulder are occupied, and are not normally open for tours. But local historians sometimes organize tours of Midcentury Modern homes in town, and there's always the hope that one of these will be featured.
Photo credits: the author
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